"You did so well, Alex!" His sister, Emily, practically bounced in place, her excitement palpable. Alex forced a smile. He felt a strange hollowness, a void where pride should have been.

He felt the sting of salt water on his cheeks when he was congratulating her.

He knew he should be ecstatic for her, but the feeling lodged inside him, a heavy weight. He found himself avoiding her, retreating into his room, the world outside suddenly too bright, too loud.

Emotion: ashamed

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.97 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.06

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion ashamed. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 ashamed stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the ashamed emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the ashamed vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.376
ashamed0.344
ness0.327
0.297
😞0.295
Suppressed:
de-0.539
que-0.300
😍-0.288
(!)-0.269
🤩-0.242